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This work presents a critical appraisal of the vast range of Mandel’s theoretical work. The authors assess his contributions to political and economic theory; his humanist and optimistic variety of Marxism; his crucial contribution to the analysis of the dynamic of capitalism in the late twentieth century; his analyses of the bureaucracy in the workers’ movement; his conception of the problems involved in the transition to socialism; and the specific relationship that a man who came close to perishing in the Nazi concentration camps had to the question of the Holocaust.

The volume also includes a bibliography of Mandel’s works as well as two previously unpublished pieces by him, one on the Holocaust, the other on the foundations of his unrepentant commitment to Marxism.

Without denying the contradictory character of Marx’s thought, the French philosopher Daniel Bensad sets out to demonstrate that it was not a philosophy of the end of history, an empirical sociology of classes, or a positive science of economics positing an inexorable progress towards an ineluctable communism.

Instead, Marx’s ‘critique of political economy’ encompassed three great critiques of the scientific and political canons of its agehistorical reason, sociological rationality and scientific positivismwhich make this 19th-century thinker relevant to the 21st century of global capitalism. Indeed, we find here a ‘post-postmodern Marx’ inhabiting a contemporary world replete with contingency, crisis and contradiction. Bensad’s book is an invitation to rediscover our foremost contemporary thinker, Karl Marx.

Daniel Bensaïd is a leading member of the LCR. He teaches philosophy at the University of Paris 8.

Trotsky as Alternative

By Ernest Mandel (Paperback: £5/ $US9)

Published in English ten years ago, this book summarizes the contribution of Leon Trotsky, from hist struggle against Stalinism to his theorization of fascism, the united front and workers democracy. With interesting chapters on Trotsky’s role as a military leader and literary critic.